Breaking Out of the Box

Across the country, hundreds of school buildings are reaching the end of their life span. Educators and architects are teaming up to reinvent the physical environment of schools so they foster learning for the whole community.

Whittier School in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood.

Photos of Whittier School by Chris Roberts, courtesy DLR Group

By Suzie Boss

For the better part of a century Whittier Elementary School has been a landmark in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, which hugs a hillside above an historic ship canal and the waters of Puget Sound. It's the kind of community where parents walk their children to school and get involved in their education, the kind of school where high achievement is the norm. But by the late 1990s, Whittier was starting to feel like a favorite toy that has been loved to death. Not only was the aging building showing visible signs of wear — including a leaky roof and sagging ceiling tiles — but it was cramped and poorly designed for the way teachers work with children today. What's more, there was little space inside for community use.

After two years of construction funded by the district's Building Excellence Program, a structure suited for a new century has risen on the site of the old school. Borrowing metaphors from the nearby ship locks, the school is a seafaring fantasyland that captures a child's sense of wonder. The playful mood begins inside the front doors — which include architectural elements from the original Whittier School as a nod to neighborhood history. Hallways are adorned with graphics of sea grasses, big bubbles, and shapes that mimic waves. Upstairs, a "bridge" bearing images of stainless steel fish crosses an expanse, connecting two wings and cleverly satisfying a safety code. Outside, a whimsical sea serpent undulates across the playground.

For the adults who work here, the new facility feels "uplifting, effective, safe, and secure," says Principal Greg Immel. The academic wing features a large library, technology center, and classrooms grouped in pods to encourage teamwork and collaboration within grade levels. For the community, the school now offers resources for all generations, with a separate wing housing everything from a Head Start preschool to a social program for senior citizens to a gym that's open for recreation late into the evenings. Since its opening in 1999, Whittier Elementary has won praise and prizes, including a Citation of Excellence from the American School Board Journal and an Exemplary Learning Environment award from the American Institute of Architects.

But the real test of the $9 million facility, says Immel, is whether it's kid-friendly. "From the minute the children walked in here," he says, "I knew we had succeeded. They love it, and that tells me we did things right."

All across the country, more and more communities are facing the challenge of repairing or replacing their aging or overcrowded school buildings. It's no small task. The General Accounting Office reports that one-third of America's schools need extensive repairs and puts the price tag to bring them into good condition at more than $112 billion. The National Education Association estimates it will cost upward of $322 billion to repair, modernize, and build enough public schools to meet projected population growth. And Newsweek forecasts a $500 billion school-building boom in the upcoming decade to accommodate rising enrollments and a desire for smaller class sizes. Currently, construction begins every business day on two new K-12 school projects somewhere in the country.

For architects and educators alike, this is also a rare moment of opportunity — a chance to "do things right" for the next several generations.

21st Century Schools

The chance for a community to build a new school doesn't come along very often. Today, the average American school is 42 years old. Schools designed four decades ago were typically built quickly and economically, to accommodate the hordes of baby boomers. Facility design was pretty standard back then, with classrooms lined up along corridors, blackboards front and center, and rooms shaped like rectangles to house neat rows of desks. There was no need to wire up classrooms for the Internet, because it didn't yet exist. And practices such as project-based learning and schools-within-schools — decades away from gaining popularity — had no impact on facilities designed to move students from grade to grade as if they were on a factory conveyor belt.

Schools designed today are expected to last half a century or longer and allow for more forward-thinking educational practices. Craig Mason, the Seattle architect who designed Whittier Elementary for DLR Group, says strategies have changed considerably in his profession. "Back in the '60s, the last time we had a big crunch of school building, the main question was: How fast and how cheap?" Today, he says, architects are asking, "How will the design support the educational program of the school?"

Getting everything right for the next 50 years is a tall order. Teachers want flexible spaces that will accommodate more active classrooms, weave in the latest technology, allow them to collaborate with their colleagues, but also give them workplace basics such as storage cabinets and nearby restrooms. Parents often ask for attention to safety and smaller class sizes. School boards worry about escalating costs for buildings and the land to build them on. And community members, looking at the investment they're asked to shoulder, clamor for buildings that can be used around the clock by people of all ages.

Recognizing that districts across the country will be struggling to meet these complex demands on a limited budget, the U.S. Department of Education is encouraging new schools to be designed not only as effective places for learning but also as centers of their communities. At a National Symposium on School Design sponsored by the Department of Education in 1998, six principles for designing and planning new schools were outlined. The principles advocate learning environments that:

Enhance teaching and learning and accommodate the needs of all learners.

Serve as center of the community.

Result from a planning/design process involving all stakeholders.

Provide for health, safety, and security.

Make effective use of all available resources.

Allow for flexibility and adaptability to changing needs.

Designing schools to serve multiple needs means applying new problem-solving approaches and experimenting with design concepts. The Department of Education advocates bringing more community members into the planning process to broaden the vision of what a new or remodeled school might look like and how it might better serve students and the community. Schools as Centers of Community: A Citizens' Guide for Planning and Design, published by the Department of Education in 2000, outlines a step-by-step process for bringing all stakeholders into the design process.

When the process works well — when a variety of users have a chance to offer suggestions and when architects are free to be creative about meeting educational and community needs — you can wind up with a stunning school like Whittier Elementary. Says architect Mason: "We always try for community involvement, but this planning group was special. It was a great collaborative process. Our challenge was to create a new landmark for the neighborhood, but still make it look and function like an elementary school." The special touches that give the building its personality are more than decorative flourishes. They're practical — albeit playful — ways to make the building enhance learning.

Spaces that shape learning

Research shows a strong connection between the built environment and student performance. Learning by Design 2000, a special edition on school architecture published by the American School Board Journal, cited research showing "school conditions have a real impact on student achievement and behavior." Among the highlights:

Students in overcrowded schools score lower on math and reading exams than their counterparts in schools that aren't crowded.

Lower achievement is associated with such factors as inadequate science facilities, substandard classroom furnishings, graffiti, and noisy environments.

Students attending schools in poor physical condition achieve at levels 11 percent lower than those attending schools in excellent condition.

Architects who specialize in school design are becoming increasingly savvy about best practices in education. The most daring advocate designs that break the mold of the "big box" schools most American children still attend.

Steven Bingler of Concordia Architects in New Orleans (and an author of the Department of Education's Schools as Centers of Community guidebook) suggests connecting schools with communities in new ways — locating schools in places such as museums or city halls. One charter school he designed, for instance, is housed inside the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Glass walls separate learning spaces from the exhibit floor but also create an openness that fosters community. What's more, the school was built at one-third the cost of a stand-alone facility.

It takes more than a little courage to plunk down a high school in the middle of a museum, but Bingler suggests the time is right for new ideas. He has collaborated with Harvard's Howard Gardner to explore the underlying question: "What is a school?" Most schools, Bingler told Education Week in a 1999 interview, are still variations on the old factory model — efficient, perhaps, but alienating to students who don't fit the "one-size-fits-all" mold. New schools that don't consider different ways of delivering education, schools that continue to isolate students from their community, "are dinosaurs on the day they open," Bigler told the Washington Post.

Indeed, experts at the forefront of school design lament the trend toward sameness in many communities. "Today's school buildings are still too much like those constructed 50 years ago," writes C. William Day in Learning by Design 2000. "Oh, they might have more electrical outlets and computers and use state-of-the-art building materials, but they tend to be otherwise spatially monotonous with rectangular rooms in which students sit at individual desks and listen to teachers who stand in front of the class."

New ideas are gaining a foothold, however, as educators, architects, and community members fine-tune their vision for schools of the future. Bruce Jilk, Minneapolis architect and chair of the American Institute of Architects Committee on Architecture for Education, has been a longtime collaborator with education researcher George Copa, interim dean at Oregon State University School of Education and a driving force behind rethinking American high schools.

Interview with George Copa

Their research has generated a set of design principles, called New Designs for Learning, that can be applied to planning schools in all sorts of settings — urban, rural, and suburban; small and large; specialized and general. The principles call for attention to everything from a school's learning context (including its unique assets, problems, opportunities, and aspirations) to its learning audience (not only school-aged youth, but also the broader community and school staff) to the learning expectations and process (focusing on the expected outcomes for students and the learning projects that will help them reach those goals).

How do the principles look in practice? In a word: spectacular. Jilk and Copa have created such innovative learning environments as Minnesota's School of Environmental Studies, known as the Zoo School because of its location on the grounds of the Minnesota Zoological Gardens. The school serves 400 students in grades 11 and 12, who pursue interdisciplinary learning and tackle hands-on projects related to environmental problems in the real world. Students are organized into houses of 100 to create a more intimate scale and enhance relationships. Rather than traditional classrooms, the building includes student work stations and pods, allowing for both individual and group work. Extensive use of glass brings in the outside environment. Spaces for displaying student work send the message that student products have value — an element that the New Designs principles refer to as "learning celebration."

What new design concepts might we see in schools of the near future? Currently, Copa is helping citizens in Sumner, Washington, think boldly about the kind of school they want to create when they build a second high school for their fast-growing community. The answers are still in the formative stages, but the project should be well worth watching.

Meanwhile, Jilk and Copa are encouraging communities around the globe to think not only about how schools are organized, but also where and when learning takes place. "In our hectic lives and the need to continuously learn, how do you make the possibility to learn present all the time?" asks Copa. "Instead of thinking that learning can only take place on a campus, at a certain time in your life, how can we create opportunities for learning throughout the community and across the life span?"

That concept meshes well with the "livable communities" that many urban planners are working to create. In presentations to the international design community, Jilk draws on thinkers as diverse as John Dewey and Abraham Maslow and architectural sources ranging from ancient Greece to the New Urbanism to describe his ideas for educational environments that will respond to human needs and create opportunities for more informal, lifelong learning.

Safe, healthy buildings

When the last batch of schools was built in the 1950s and 1960s, little attention was spent on health or safety issues. Gang-related violence hadn't yet erupted. School shootings of the sort that shocked the nation in the last few years seemed unimaginable. "Safety and security were not of paramount concern when the vast majority of the nation's school facilities were designed," reports a recent publication, Safe School Design: A Handbook for Educational Leaders (ERIC Clearinghouse on Educational Management, 2000).

Authors Tod Schneider, Hill Walker, and Jeffrey Sprague, all affiliated with the Institute on Violence and Destructive Behavior at the University of Oregon, point out that the physical ecology of a school is "a powerful factor in contributing to its safety, security, and effectiveness. The design and use of school space has a huge but often unrecognized impact on the behavior of students as well as staff."

The authors advocate a set of principles known as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, or CPTED, to build safety features into the school environment. CPTED focuses on three basic concepts:

Natural surveillance — the ability to see what's going on.

Natural access control — the ability to control entry into and exit from an environment.

Territoriality — the ability of legitimate users to control an area while discouraging illicit users.

Rather than a global approach to school security, Schneider, Walker, and Sprague advocate considering local needs in order to reduce risk factors and enhance protective factors within the unique environment of a school. Structural issues are only one area to focus attention. School climate and other elements of a school's "social ecology" are just as important, the authors point out. Even attention to maintenance can bolster security. Picking up the trash or fixing broken windows, they note, "sends a strong message that this is a school someone cares about." And students get the message that they are cared about, as well.

In addition to safety issues, health concerns are also earning increased attention from school planners. Recent research has highlighted links between classroom lighting and student achievement, with students making faster progress in classrooms with large windows or skylights to bring in natural light. Acoustics can have an effect on student achievement, too, according to studies that have looked at schools located so close to airports that runway noise interferes with learning. And indoor air quality not only affects comfort levels, but also may exacerbate allergies or contribute to health problems such as asthma.

Schools that neglect basic maintenance may be inadvertently contributing to students' health problems. In an interview last year with CNN, C. Kenneth Tanner of the University of Georgia's School Design and Performance Laboratory cited dirty carpeting and leaky roofs as factors that can lead to mold spores and trigger respiratory ailments and allergies.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is developing a set of guidelines called Tools for New Schools to assist school planners in providing a healthier and more productive learning environment for students and staff. According to the EPA, attention to indoor air quality can have an impact on student learning, comfort, and attendance, and similarly affects performance of teachers and other staff members who may experience greater discomfort or absenteeism in schools with poor air quality.

Community value

For communities willing to consider new options for school designs, the rewards can be long-lasting and profound. "The most successful schools of the future," predicts Schools as Centers of Community, "will be integrated learning communities, which accommodate the needs of all of the community's stakeholders. They will be schools that will be open later, longer, and for more people in the community from senior citizens using the gym and health facilities during off-hours to immigrants taking evening English classes after work."

The silver lining is that innovative schools don't have to be any more expensive than the old big-box facilities. In Washington's Vancouver School District, which enjoys a national reputation for its innovative school design process, cost per square foot of some of the most spectacular schools in the country is less than the state average for school construction. One Vancouver principal says the district's up-to-date school architecture is even a helpful recruiting tool: "When I interview teacher applicants that I really want to hire, I bring them to the school for a tour. They can't wait to go to work here!"

Vancouver (WA.) community partakes in school design

Seattle parent Lisa MacFarlane is president of Schools First, an organization that has lobbied to support the Building Excellence Program currently rebuilding 19 schools throughout the Seattle district. "New schools make a difference," she explained recently in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "They have a catalytic effect — energizing students, parents, teachers, and even neighborhoods. They also say a lot about how our community values children and their futures."

Just ask the kids at Whittier Elementary, who every day walk through the doors of a school designed to make them feel safe, secure, welcome, connected to their neighborhood, and eager to learn.

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